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William Ross Hostetter
Ross Hostetter may have been a student at Shimer College in the Seminary period. He was the youngest son of pioneer Mount Carroll physician Abraham Hostetter. He was a dairy farmer, operating the "Grouseland" farm near Mount Carroll and also manufacturing ice cream. In addition to being an active participant in the Illinois state dairy association, he was made an honorary member of the Indiana State Dairy Association in 1892.http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/dairy/isda/history.htm In 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition, he was serving as secretary of the Illinois State Dairyman's Association. He and his brother Abram prepared the Carroll County exhibits, and were credited with the county's securing first place in "Grains, Grasses and Dairy Products".http://genealogytrails.com/ill/carroll/carrollpageant.html Attendance "Mr. W.R. Hostetter" is listed as the president of the Reunion Society in 1891, which strongly suggests that he had been a student.http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Oread_August_1891.djvu/23 However, it is possible that he was appointed to the position on the basis of longstanding closeness to the school and community -- or that "Mr." was a misprint for "Mrs." He is not listed in the 1862 catalog, indicating that if he attended the Seminary, it was later than July 1862. Shimer connections *Husband of alum and long-serving trustee Elizabeth Barber Hostetter *Father of alum and two-time acting president A. Beth Hostetter Mentioned *"The Real Profit of Dairying", The Farmers Voice, 1899-01-21, p. 6 (full text): *:At the recent meeting of the Illinois Dairymen's association at Galesburg, W. R. Hostetter read a paper in which he said the average annual profit from a cow in his township is $11. In the audience sat two farmers and one of them said in an audible tone to his neighbor: "I don't want to run a dairy on that kind of a profit." Thus are such matters often looked at from the wrong viewpoint. Mr. Hostetter has made money keeping cows at a profit of $11 a year from each one. *ftot alone from the profit on the cows does he make money. That is the smallest end of the profit he looks for. He feeds his grain and hay to his cows and gets the market price for it on his own farm. He saves to his farm the plant food the grain farmer sends to market in the form of grain. At the end of the year Mr. Hostetter has sold his crops to his cows, charging them full market value for what they consumed, and they have paid him $11 each more than he could have got for the crops if he had hauled them to market at Mt. Carroll. Not only has he been saved the labor of hauling the crops to market, but the cows have returned to him in the fertilizer they made more than nine-tenths of the plant food—the fertility—that would have been lost to the farm if the crops had been sold in the market. *:Here is where the real profits of dairying come in. The cows pay for the feed they consume, return to the land most of the fertilizing value of the feed and besides this pay $11 each clear profit above the cost of the feed and the labor of caring for them. Labor is profitably employed all the year and crops sold at a big price in a certain market. The farmer who sat in the audience that day did not think far enough before condemning dairying. Profiled *on RootsWeb (Alice Horner) References Category:Attendance uncertain Category:Shimer couples Category:Farmers